A Q&A with Dread Delusion Creative Director James Wragg
Dread Delusion was a game that was on my radar for a long while. A game I wanted to spend some time with, but never quite figured out how or when. Well, a PAX appointment certainly is a great excuse to get acquainted.
I wanted to get a taste for the game. To see what it was about and move on. But... before I knew it, Dread Delusion had soaked up important pre-PAX work hours and I stood 25 hours later on a finished game and a burning desire to sit down and chat with James Wragg of Brighton-based Lovely Hellplace. He's one of the brilliant minds behind this incredible low-poly open world RPG that horrifies you with incredibly difficult decisions and some of the most grotesque low-res creatures you've ever seen.
Video Games are Good: Can you give us the quick pitch on what Dread Delusion is all about?
James Wragg: Dread Delusion is a low-poly RPG with an open world that's inspired by a lot of things. It's inspired by games like Morrowind, but also games like Zelda and Dark Souls. And really, it's a game where I wanted to tell cool, interesting, weird little stories in a space where you could wander around and see cool things on the horizon and just kind of chase your imagination.
VGG: One of the things I love about Dread Delusion was that low-poly retro feel. Not just graphically, but in the ways that it plays like an open world game would in that era. Why was that style choice important to your vision for Dread Delusion and what, in your eyes, were the key pieces that brought that style to life?
Wragg: I've always liked PlayStation 1 games. The PS1 startup screen still just makes me feel things. What I think it does really well is that games of that era are more unashamedly games. While modern games often chase pseudo-realism, and they look very pretty, it's often quite difficult to tell what you can interact with. Whereas in old PS1 games, it's very clear what is an interactable element, or where you're supposed to go or what you can do.
There's something about this aesthetic that I think relates it to pressing games down into their component forms.
VGG: The other thing that so impressed us with Dread Delusion was the writing and the worldbuilding. Can you talk about the process of building the world and some of the unexpected inspirations you had in making that happen?
Wragg: By the end of the game, we had a small writing team. Myself, I wrote the main questline. Io Brindle — our lead writer — did a lot of stuff, but also did the Clockwork Kingdom, which many people think of as their favorite area. And then folks like Harry Tufts, we had kind of a small writing team.
But when it first started, it was just me. A lot of the game came out of me in Blender and Unity, making weird things. I made flying islands. I made the sky pink and put a weird star in it just because it looks cool. But then by doing that, I had to kind of work backwards to create interesting lore around that. By starting in some strange places, it was a really great kind of writing prompt to come up with weird characters and factions and places. You start asking yourself questions like why do people live on flying islands?
Maybe it's because the world's surfaces are a seething hell, you know? So yeah, it kind of came out of just messing around with game design and having a really great writing team who could take all these elements and apply a brilliant level of polish and just superb writing.
"I wanted to tell cool, interesting, weird little stories in a space where you could wander around and see cool things on the horizon and just kind of chase your imagination."
VGG: I know you just launched and it's probably not anywhere near your mind, but this world seems ripe for so many more stories. Is there any plan to, even if it's not Dread Delusion 2, set some other game in this world or some other version of this world?
Wragg: Personally, I'm not really that interested in making another Dread Delusion just yet, just because I feel like we told a great story with Dread Delusion. I kind of want to move on to different things, if I'm honest. If I ever did a Dread Delusion sequel, I quite liked the idea that you'd actually team up with Vela, who's the main antagonist of this game. It’d be a story where she survived the first game and the world is in pieces due to the choices the player made in the first game.
I like the idea of the antagonist of the second game being like a bad player of the first game. You’d need to team up with Vela to fight the player and I thought that’d be a cool idea.
But, I'm mainly telling you that because I don't think I'll ever make it. Now at least someone knows.
VGG: Is there anything else you’d like to say to Dread Delusion's community?
Wragg: Well, I’d like to just give a massive thank you to the community. We're blown away by how well it's been received and we love that people really vibe with the story and the lore. It resonates with people way more than I thought it would, and I'm just really humbled by the reception it's had. Myself and all of the team are just super grateful for that, so, you know, I'm honored.
VGG: [laughing] Well you know, you did put us all through a lot of difficult decisions.
Wragg: Yeah, I'm… I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
VGG: I genuinely stood at the final choice forever and couldn’t make up my mind to choose. It really challenged me to roleplay a specific kind of character and I was fascinated by how every decision in the game managed to be that difficult. So actually, before we let you go, how do you go about making a narrative of choices that are just, no matter what, the choices feel both right and wrong?
Wragg: I think partly they're inspired, for me at least, by the fact that I tend to be quite an anxious person, and sometimes I really do wrestle with that. And sometimes, I really do have decisions in my life where I'm not sure what the right answer is. I think I've funneled that into the game a bit.
But, also, I do appreciate that in the gaming press, I've noticed a bit of fatigue to genuinely difficult moral conundrums. So, maybe with future games, I'll make some easier calls...
If you'd like to painstakingly suffer through some difficult decisions yourself, check out the game on Steam and play it today. It's out already, and you too might lose a day or two to it!
Want to see more like this? Check out all of our PAX West 2024 coverage, including more from the DreadXP booth (publisher of Dread Delusion), such as the PSX-inspired survival horror game Heartworm.
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